Ellie Quin Book 3: Beneath the Neon Sky

Many a student of history today, at some point, wonders why people in the 20th and 21st centuries were so obsessed with
robots
. One can’t help but find amusing those clips from the beginning of the new millennium, of presenters and technology pundits telling their viewing audience that one day in the near future every household would be waited on hand-and-foot by some silicon servant. In fact, there is a very famous antique news clip from 2002 of a bipedal, man-sized robot, walking slowly and falteringly up a set of stairs. The robot was called ‘Asimo’ and it was built by a company called ‘Honda’. This unremarkable achievement was met by rapturous applause and the flashing of camera lights, and represented back then the very height of robotic technology…. the ability to walk up a set of stairs.

With hindsight we know that, when this moment was recorded for posterity, the science of robotics and artificial intelligence, ‘cybernetics’ as they dubbed it, was on the verge of being sidelined by a technology that would wholly eclipse it. From our vantage point here in the present, it is too easy to look back over time and be amused at their primitive attempts to build living, thinking, moving beings from metal and silicon.

Genetic science pushed all of that to one side.

Throughout the fifteen hundred years from the birth of genetic science to the time of Ellie Quin, this science grew to become the nuts and bolts of society itself. Genetics provided most of the technology-crutches that cybernetics had at one time promised. For example, instead of robots building the world of the future, genetic technology gave us GEN-IMPs (
GEN
etic
I
ndustry and
M
anufacturing
P
ersonnel), known colloquially at the time as ‘jimps’. These were engineered bipedal, four-armed, drone workers with simple brains and life spans that could be adjusted to suit the job. This laboratory-made species was responsible for most of the hard physical labor across Human Space, and at the peak of their use these squat, pale skinned creatures were a common enough sight in every construction project on every planet in Human Space.

Genetic science back then was used in almost every facet of life: food production, pharmaceuticals, computers, textiles, plastics.

The human population itself became a genetic product.

Fertility amongst woman had declined to the point where natural childbirth no longer occurred. New generations were instead engineered. This provided the opportunity for the authorities to
enhance
the babies they produced for eager parents, supposedly to better cope with the varied hardships of the new colonial worlds being tamed.

Actually, they were being carefully manipulated by the Administration to be more pliable, docile, compliant….to be obedient little consumers content to leave complicated and important matters, like running the universe, to those in power. Some of the less charitable of historians today wonder whether the IQ of the general population of Ellie’s time differed that much from the gene-imps that worked amongst them.

User Comment > Anonymous

We wuz all once ugly mutants. I saw pictures of the freaks from Ellie Quin’s time. Why did they make people so ugliez back then?

User Comment > GenePool

Want to be bigger, gentlymen? Want to be longer, wider for the ladeez? Get insta-gene implants to make your Mr Happy, happy.

User Comment > LostAndLonely

I don’t need a man with a big schlong. I need a man with a big heart. Is there an insta-gene implant for that? Doubt it.

User Comment > KozzlePudz

You Humanz obsessed with reproductions. How you creatures evolve into space beat me.

CHAPTER 1

‘Hufty, it’s me again. Well now, what can I say? It’s been an incredibly busy few weeks. There’s so much to tell you that it’s hard to know where exactly to start. Okay, let me start this way….’ Ellie paused for a moment and passed the voice-diary from one hand to the other.

‘So, I had this whacko idea about a month ago. The idea was…running shuttle visits up to the north polar region. You see, Aaron had lost his regular shuttle contract, and Jez and I were struggling to find any decent work in the city. It just seemed to fit everyone’s needs. So, stupidly, I thought getting Jez and Aaron together and blurting the idea out in front of them might be a smart thing to do. I couldn’t have been more wrong,’ said Ellie wearily as she sat down for a moment on the crate beside her. Her arms ached painfully from the work she had done so far this morning.

‘They liked the idea so-o-o much…I’m here right now inside Aaron’s shuttle painting the inside of this daggy cargo hold.’

Ellie surveyed her progress. This was her sixth day on the job, sloshing white paint on to the pitted metal walls with a brush on an extended pole to reach the very top, where the walls curved and became the roof of the cargo hold. She was beginning to wonder whether there was ever going to be an end to this interminable task. She had spent the previous week scrubbing the very same metal walls with detergent to remove several decades’ worth of encrusted grime. Every exposed inch of her skin was either smeared with grease, smudged with grime, or dotted with white flecks of paint, or all three.

‘I definitely pulled the cruddiest job. Jez’s gone into New Haven, sorting some things out, and Aaron has just left to talk to some ship-fitters. So it’s just me here on black-pad 79 with the shuttle. Just me and, of course,
Harvey
.’

Ellie shot a quick glance across the hold towards the jimp working silently and diligently with another brush on the opposite wall. ‘Aaron bought a jimp at an auction. It was from some construction company that was shutting down, or gone out of business or something. Harvey’s only got another three or four months left on his license, then we’ll need to re-register him.’

She watched the creature work methodically, carefully dipping the brush into the tub of paint beside it.

For some reason she thought of Harvey as a
him.
Silly really seeing as the thing had no sex organs. However, both Jez and Aaron both referred to him as
IT
, and despite Ellie’s insistence, rarely referred to him as
Harvey
, her choice of name of course. It seemed to suit him.

‘Harvey’s a great little worker,’ she said smiling fondly at the jimp. ‘And he’s a clever little thing too. He understands a lot more, I think, than people give him credit for. Aaron’s put me in charge of him, said I was bossy enough that I might as well have my own
staff
to help me with tidying up this cruddy hold.’

Harvey stopped for a moment, recognizing that his recently given name had been spoken aloud. He turned to look at Ellie, the pale grey skin above his beady black eyes furrowed into a worried-looking frown.

‘Hey, it’s okay Harvey,’ she called out, ‘I’m just recording my diary. It’s okay, you go back to work, there’s a good boy,’ she reassured him in a soft voice.

The jimp nodded once dutifully, turned back around and resumed carefully applying whitewash to the wall, all four muscular arms working the extended brush rhythmically up and down.

‘They say these gene-imps are engineered not to have any feelings at all, and that they have a maximum intelligence that’s roughly, like, the same as a six or seven year old child. I think. I’m not so sure though. I reckon Harvey’s smarter than that, and I’m pretty sure he feels some sorts of emotions too. I’ve never seen his mouth smile or anything like that, but his eyes sometimes seem to look happy or sad. I don’t know, I guess it’s hard to tell for certain if he’s feeling or thinking anything.’

She pulled herself up onto her feet, feeling the aching fatigue ripple up her legs, back, and upper arms, and crossed the floor towards him, her boots clunking noisily against the metal grill floor and echoing around Lisa’s empty cargo hold.

‘Harvey?’

The jimp carefully placed the brush down and turned round slowly to look at her.

Ellie spoke slowly and clearly. ‘I am going to get some water to drink. Would you like to have some?’

‘Yaasss, Missss Eh-leeee,’ he replied quietly, the sibilants exaggerated by his long narrow tongue.

‘You take a rest for a few minutes, okay?’

His eyebrows furrowed once more. She knew that the gesture meant a momentary confusion, but actually it made him look worried, like the weight of the world was temporarily resting on his muscular shoulders. Ellie made a sleeping gesture, closing her eyes and placing a palm against one cheek. ‘Rest….take a break? Yeah?’

Harvey finally nodded, the worried frown gradually faded from his face as he worked out what she was saying to him.

‘Ressssting,’ he said gently and settled down onto the floor on his haunches, wrapping his arms around his knees.

‘I will be back in a few minutes,’ said Ellie as she headed towards the back of the hold and down the ramp onto the landing pad.

The long-stay pad was ‘recessed’ right now. It had been lowered down from the large plasticrete landing field above into this isolated and air-filled maintenance hangar. Ellie preferred it when the pad had been up. From the cramped comfort of the shuttle’s cockpit she had been able to happily watch the comings and goings of craft all day and all night long; the streams of surface-to-orbit barges descending from the sky, the regular arrivals of surface shuttles down into the giant caldera in which New Haven nestled. However, with work being done on Lisa inside and out, the ship needed to be down in the air-filled hangar. She felt cut off from the busy world outside, and a little claustrophobic, despite its immense size.

She walked around the outside of the shuttle, her footsteps echoing off the dark walls of the hangar, and noted with a weary sigh how much more work Lisa needed to have done on the outside before she was presentable enough to be considered a
recreational vessel
. The hull was a drab brown, the last fading scabs of paint from a previous lifetime were all but gone, blasted and scoured by the winds and sands of the planet. It had been Jez’s suggestion to also paint the outside white, like snow….giving the shuttle the look as if it had been designed from the very beginning to be an arctic vehicle.

Yeah, thanks a yahoo for
that
suggestion, Jez.

She went back inside the shuttle, walking up a smaller entry ramp at the front beneath its snub nose, and entered the front cabin; Aaron’s scruffy home.

Inside she picked her way through the chaotic mess of the cabin towards the galley, placed a plastic jug beneath the water faucet and hit the button.

‘So, Hufty, I’m cleaning up and decorating the cargo hold right now,’ she said, resuming her diary entry. ‘It’s really totally scraggy, shitty work, but you know what? I don’t think I mind. It’s kinda cool.’

Despite moaning about it, despite the aching fatigue in her arms and back. It felt good. It felt like this might just be her first proper step forward. The first glimmer of hope that she might one day follow in Sean footsteps and find a way off Harpers Reach.

‘Aaron says that one day, if he earns enough money, he’s going to buy a small interplanetary shuttle. One of those medium sized freighters that can lug goods from one planet to another within a solar system. Crud, that would be totally-hoobie doing that, to see a world from orbit, to actually be IN space, it gives me chills just thinking about it!’

She hit the button again to turn the faucet off, picked up the plastic jug and two tumblers, and headed out of the cabin and down the ramp back onto the hangar floor.

‘But that’s probably a way off yet, Aaron says. It’s all going to depend on whether we can make a go of this polar-run thing. Jez’s convinced there’re enough
toppers
in the city…stupid rich people, the ones who live in the upper-most floors, the penthouses, to make us rich too.’

She rounded the back of the shuttle and proceeded up the loading ramp into the cargo hold once more.

‘I did some maths Hufty, just to work it out, just to work out how long it would take to buy a ticket off-world, and out of the system. So…it costs about thirty thousand creds to buy a jump-ticket to another system aboard one of the cheaper freight ships. If we can really make the money Jez thinks we can, that’s about a hundred polar-runs….say three or four years, doing it, say, three times a month. That’s if we save every cred though,’ she said then paused to think about how long four years actually was.

Three or four years? She’d be twenty-three, twenty-four years old by the time she left Harpers Reach. A good age to be exploring the universe she decided.

She knelt down beside Harvey, who rocked gently on his flat feet.

‘Well, that’s me done for now Hufty. There’s a crap-load of work to do.’

She snapped off the voice-diary, poured a glass of water into one of the tumblers and held it out to Harvey.

The jimp uncertainly held a calloused hand out towards the offered cup.

‘Yeah, that’s right…that’s yours, Harvey.’

‘Water, Misss Eh-leeeee?’

‘Yes, water.’

He gently slid his fingers around the cup and took it from her, pouring it carefully into his small lipless slash of a mouth.

‘There’s a good boy,’ she said.

Harvey drained the plastic tumbler and passed it back to her.